The currency of academia is prestige.  Professors try to increase theirs by publishing better and better papers, giving talks at conferences and so on.  Becoming more prestigious means offers to co-author with a more illustrious class of academics, increasing the chance of book deals at better university presses, etc.  And at the institutional level, universities become more prestigious by being able to attract and nurture a more prestigious group of professors, something which is done by lavishing them with higher salaries, more research funds, better equipment, better graduate students (and to a lesser degree undergraduate students too).  All this has been clear for a long time.

In any given field, we might know which ten or twenty people are at the top globally – Nobel Prize winners for instance (speaking of which, this Freakonomics podcast on How to Win a Nobel Prize is hugely informative and entertaining on the how the Swedish committees decide who really is “top of the field”).  But after that it is pretty hazy: one’s list of the top twenty health researchers who have yet to win the Nobel for Medicine probably depends a lot on what sub-field you’re in and how you evaluate the last decade’s relative progress in various other subfields.  Same with universities before rankings came along.  It doesn’t take a genius to work out that Toronto, McGill and UBC are the top three in Canada.  But after that it gets fuzzy.  If you were in Medicine, you might think number four was McMaster; in Engineering Waterloo and in Arts Montreal or Alberta.

Then along came large bibliometric databases, and shortly thereafter, rankings.  And then we knew how to measure prestige.  We did it by measuring publications, citations, and whatnot: the more, the better.  Universities began managing towards this metric, which built on longstanding trends in most disciplines towards more demanding publication requirements for tenure (the first known use of the phrase “publish or perish” dates from 1942).  Want prestige?  Research. Publish.  Repeat.

But I get the real sense that this starting to change, for universities if not individual professors.  I can’t provide much strong evidence here: you won’t see the change in the usual rankings because they are hardwired for old definitions of prestige.  Nevertheless, if you look around at which universities are “hot”, and receive the acclaim, it’s not necessarily the ones who are doing the publishing; rather, it’s the ones that are actively contributing to the dynamism of their local economies.  MIT’s gradual overtaking of Harvard is one example of this.  But so too is the fuss over institutions like SUNY Albany and its associated nanotech cluster, Akron and its Advanced materials cluster.  In Canada, the obvious example is Waterloo but even here in Toronto, Ryerson has become a “hot” university in part because of its focus on interacting with business in a couple of key areas such as tech (albeit in quite a different way from Waterloo).

To be clear, it’s not a case of publishing v. working with industry.  Generally speaking, companies like to know that the people they are working with are in fact at the front of their fields; no publishing, no partnership.  But it’s more of a general orientation: increasingly, the prestigious universities are the ones who not only have a concentration of science and engineering talent, but also have a sufficiently outward focus to act as an anchoring institution to one or more industrial clusters.

What’s interesting about this trend is that it has some clear winners and losers.   To even have a hope of working in an industrial centre, you need to be in a mid-size city which already has some industry (even if, as in Akron’s case, it’s down in the dumps).  That works for Canada, because (Queen’s excepted) nearly all our big and prestigious universities are in mid-sized or large cities.  In the US, however, it’s more difficult.  Their universities are often older, built in a time where people believed universities were better-off situated away from the “sinful” cities.  And so you have big, huge research institutions in places like Champaign, Illinois or Columbia Missouri which are going to struggle in this new environment (even places like Madison and Ann Arbour are far enough away from big cities to make thing problematic).  Basically, the Morrill Act is now imposing some pretty serious legacy costs on American higher education.

Part of the reason this shift hasn’t been more widely acknowledged is that bibliometrics are a whole lot easier to measure than economic value (and are valued more in tenure discussions).  But some people are starting to have a go at this problem, too.  More on this tomorrow.